RURAL ROUTES/Margot Ford McMillen

Corporations Trash Research Universities

It's official. By which I mean that it's been in the Wall
Street Journal. Our research universities are becoming hazardous
waste dumps, the academic earth loaded with chemicals that taxpayers
will have to pay to remove.

Take University of Georgia, for example. "Buried in the hillside
are tons of leaky containers of unknown chemicals, along with the
rotting carcasses of chickens, mice, rats and other lab animals dosed
with chloroform and slightly radioactive tracer chemicals. When it
rains, a watery tea of all this stuff oozes from the soil into the
stream ... " says the Journal.

According to Industry's most credible and revered source, Yale,
Stanford, the University of Hawaii, and the University of West
Virginia all have environmental problems and have been cited by the
US Environmental Protection Agency.

Some of the waste is generated through undergraduate education,
but most of it is left when researchers finish grant work and move
on, or when grants pay for professor stipends and materials, but not
for clean-up. Universities are eager for such grants, because the
money brings the highest caliber researchers to campus. At the same
time, corporations benefit because the researchers' work results in
patents and products that can be purchased or appropriated by the
industry.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, hazardous waste from the
university dumps is dangerous to ground water and to university
visitors. The University of Georgia Botanical Garden is built on a
hazardous waste dump, nice place for a picnic, and will be cleaned up
at a cost of "at least $20 million." The Journal article
doesn't touch on health dangers to neighbors and to lab
assistants.

It's not just the university turf that's at risk. Just like the
rest of us, professors take their work home. At the University of
Missouri-Columbia, a household hazardous waste collection netted so
many chemicals from professors' basements that the City of Columbia
was stuck with a $40,000 disposal bill.

At the University of Missouri-Rolla, formerly called the Rolla
School of Mines, a $44,000 grant from the US Interior Department
allowed the university to build a smelting facility to test lead
mined from the Ozarks. The project, a corporate welfare gift from
Senator Kit Bond to Doe Run Mining, was built as cheaply as possible
and even allowed plastic pipe for high-temperature vent.

It didn't take long for the plastic pipe to fail, and lead and
toxic waste were released into the air every time the smelter was
cranked up. According to lab technician Bob Lunsford, who reported
the scam to the Department of Natural Resources, clouds of waste were
released into the engineering building, and sifted down to a Catholic
school, apartments, and restaurants within a few hundred yards of the
place. On a test run of the smelter April 3, 1997, 14 pounds of lead
sulfate was released into the environment.

Lead contaminated the building's trash that was picked up and
taken to the landfill. Lead-laced cleaning rags were routinely
discarded with other trash. Lead contaminated the gray water that
traveled through the drains and into the Rolla city sewage treatment
plant.

Lead is a heavy metal that has been proven to cause mental
retardation in children, but lab assistants working on the grant were
not given respirators, safety glasses, disposable clothing or
booties. Custodians cleaning the building were given no special
instruction. All of the workers took lead home to their families.

Everyone that worked in the building, from custodians to kids in
the Catholic school next door to visitors admiring the campus's scale
model of Stonehenge, was endangered.

In short, research universities are hazardous to public health.
They have shown again and again that they are not willing or able to
anticipate problems with experiments and safeguard the public.
Consider the troubles that research ag schools have unleashed on the
public. Animal factories, like Missouri's infamous Premium Standard
Farm, were fine-tuned by ag school profs working for industry.
Experimental model waste lagoons monitored by teams of grad students
behaved just fine. But the researchers didn't have the time or money
to figure out that waste lagoons in the environment would be clogged
with discarded trash like fetuses, work gloves and syringes. Or that
the dams would leak and spill contents into creeks. Or that the
gasses would make neighbors sick.

Biotech crops, like the Bt tomatoes, potatoes and corn that exude
their own pesticides from every cell, came from university labs.
These labs are financed by industry or by generous taxpayer-financed
grants. The grants, have been awarded by federal foundations like the
National Science Foundation. The foundations are funded by taxpayer
money appropriated by grateful, re-elected senators who received
campaign money from industry.

But scientists are interested in science, and not in how the
science relates to the world. The Bt crops have been implanted with
genes that create their own insect killer. That's all the scientists
wanted to achieve. Their experimental crops proved to be
pest-resistant, but the researchers didn't have enough time or money
to see if the crops killed other animals -- like Monarch butterflies.
And, the pesticides stay in the soil for months after harvest. In
fact, nobody knows how long it takes for a field of Bt corn to lose
its toxicity, or how many species the toxic chemical kills.

Scientists also forgot to find out if the crops were safe for
animals and humans to eat. Or if Bt pollen would infect nearby
traditional crops. Or if nearby weeds pick up the Bt-producing genes
and begin to kill on their own. Or if the target species, the enemy
insects, would become resistant to Bt.

When criticized, the researchers have refused to accept evidence
from the field, and demanded "hard science." When confronted with
hard science, much of it from labs in Europe, the researchers have
another answer: "Our next generation of gene-tinkered plants will be
better," goes the story, "safer, cheaper, smarter."

We can stop this madness now by refusing to buy the stuff Industry
cooks up in the University labs. Safer, cheaper, smarter? That's
us!

Margot Ford McMillen farms and teaches English at a college in
Fulton, Mo. Email: mcmillm@jaynet.wcmo.edu